My first interspecies music experience occurred when I was studying traditional Mayan songs in San Crist-bal de las Casas, Mexico, near the Guatemalan border. Every morning I played my native flute for an hour in the backyard. Whenever I hit a certain high note, the tom turkey next door let out a resounding gobble. I ventured next door to meet him: fat and brown, red wattles drooped over his nose, a multicolored tail spread wide like a Spanish fan. When I played the usual song, he responded by shaking his wings before dropping them into the dirt, raising a small cloud of dust. He advanced like a flamenco dancer, four deliberate steps forward, then four steps back. Every so often, the red wattles turned deep blue and back to red again. And every single time I hit a high note at the end of the verse's third measure, he let out a solitary gobble.

Over the next month, I spent an hour a day playing strange songs with that turkey. I soon deciphered the mechanical relationship between loud volume, high pitch, and the turkey's gobble instinct. It was fun and easy to program the gobbling into a song by accentuating certain notes: ta ta ta TA (gobble gobble gobble). But when I accented too many notes in succession, hoping for a crescendo of gobbles, the turkey reached his breaking point and ran.

Our jam session was not exactly interspecies communication. Music involves sharing tones, harmonies, and rhythms. Communication insists on transmitting information, on each party understanding the other's drift. Was I communicating with my plump friend? I was skeptical. Nonetheless, I was collaborating with a bird, who eventually sat beside the barbed wire fence waiting for me to arrive. I grew sensitive to his moods; we shared feelings about the weather and a dislike of quick movements, sounds, change. I learned how to operate on turkey time, how to distinguish between domination and equanimity, control and harmony. By these tools I was transformed; the turkey and I became friends.

Since the mid-1970s, I've explored interspecies communication as music rather than language. I've played harmonica with bobwhites along Ohio's Cuyahoga River, drums with kangaroo rats in Death Valley and howler monkeys in Panama, and mandolin with buffalo in Yellowstone Park. I believe that trying to translate dolphin whistles into English is futile, like trying to translate Beethoven into words and sentences. Animals create melodies, harmonies, and rhythms that evoke rich emotion, instill a sensitivity to surroundings, and satisfy, within the human species, a utopian longing for communion.

Some observers now insist that our civilization's very survival depends on softening our relationship to nature, on each one of us reaching out with compassion to communicate and commune with animals. But seeking communion with an animal is not the same as learning its species name, behavior, habitat, or any of the other characteristics that biology assigns to living organisms. Our longing for contact with nature is more direct than any scientific construct. Although it's often repressed by our rationalist education, this desire springs to the surface the moment we enter the wilderness or cross the path of a wild animal. We know intuitively that we are all connected, but how? Scientists, artists, and mystics all have taken up the challenge to explain the varied ways animals communicate, and to explore whether we, as the human link in the universal chain, are doing our part to understand and preserve this connection.